It’s no coincidence that a contact form plugin is among the oldest plugins on WordPress.org. Many websites, whether small blogs or large corporate sites, sooner or later need a contact form. That’s why the final plugin in this year’s Advent calendar is the excellent Form Block by German developer Matze Kittsteiner.

2025 will be the year of accessibility. Regulations will be enacted in the EU in early summer, initially targeting online shop operators. However, the topic will become more prominent regardless, which is a significant step in the right direction. In the spirit of these upcoming changes, today’s plugin is the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker.

From a painful experience here at KrautPress, I can confirm that setting up a blog isn’t hard. Sticking with it consistently, however, is. This is exactly where today’s plugin comes into play: Progress Planner.

Years ago, I wrote an article for the KrautPress Advent calendar about the Two Factor plugin. This plugin, designed to enhance login security, remains a standard feature in every WordPress installation I manage. I’ve also been experimenting with installing an additional plugin in recent months. WebAuthn Provider for Two Factor extends the original Two Factor plugin by adding another authentication method: the so-called “WebAuthn,” also referred to as “Passkeys” by most operating systems and services.

There’s a plugin I’ve been following the development of for years, though. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no use case for it. While I still toy around with the idea of switching careers to photography, let’s take a look at the photo proofing plugin Picu by the German-Swiss design and development studio haptiq.

To track your website’s visitors and gather their personal data, obtaining their consent is key. Since the introduction of the GDPR in 2018, this has become a part of daily life for many of us here in the EU. Today’s plugin, Real Cookie Banner, is designed specifically for this purpose.

Editorial Calendar – Content Overview

If you run a blog with many posts, perhaps even authored by multiple contributors, it’s easy to lose track. Today’s plugin, Editorial Calendar, is here to help.

Maintenance Mode for WordPress – Making Waiting Easy

If you’re working on a website, you might not want others to see it during that early time. However, working on a server and sharing progress with clients can sometimes be useful. The plugin Maintenance Mode for WordPress by Robert DeVore aims to solve this problem. While this isn’t a unique feature, what sets this plugin apart is its lack of ads, annoying upsells, or other inconveniences. Instead, it focuses on the essential functionality of creating Coming Soon pages – exactly as it should.

Out of the box, WordPress is surprisingly bad at equipping posts and pages with sufficient metadata. But, of course, there are appropriate plugins to address this. While many large SEO plugins include similar functionality, today we’re taking a look at a small plugin that focuses solely on this aspect: Open Graph.

WordPress behaves differently for logged-in users than for those who merely pass by. So far, nothing groundbreaking. However, even among logged-in users, there can be differences in various aspects of a website. This could be because different user roles have different permissions or because a user has customized the appearance of the block editor in a way that it now suddenly doesn’t behave as expected. The plugin User Switching by John Blackbourn is a helpful companion for troubleshooting in such cases.